At first glace, the map could be mistaken for a slightly more boring static image of suburb earthquake damage across Christchurch. However, it’s actually quite a lot cooler than that.

The information blurb on the map says:

How to Use Viewer
Welcome to EQC’s interactive map, with information about the recent earthquakes in Canterbury and EQC’s operations in the region.

To start, go to the ‘Maps’ drop down menu and make your choice by clicking on a box. You can zoom in and out on all of the maps and in some cases more information will be brought up by clicking on a suburb. The maps will be updated regularly.

As soon as you click the ‘Maps’ button in the top left corner, you can find a heap of different overlays that can be applied to the map. Categories include:

Properties with contents damage

Rapid inspections completed

Liquefaction after February earthquake

Suburbs – inspection/damage statistics (this just shows the number of damaged buildings in a suburb)

Hub zones (not really sure about this one. Appears to be a suburb-grouping system that EQC have been using)

Land classification (green, orange and red zones after the June announcement)

Land displacement – after February earthquake (quite impressive)

Earthquake information

The last one shows the intensity of earthquakes across the city in ‘MMI’, as well as the June 13th 6.3 epicentre.

Earthquake Displacement Map

I found the ‘displacement’ overlay quite interesting – you forget that the land is actually in an entirely new position than it used to be. The map shows land uplift and subsidence across the city – subsidence in light blue and uplift in a nice hot pink.

This would look great on a big screen and would be an awesome addition to any presentation on the Christchurch and Canterbury earthquakes.

The bookmarks tool helps you to jump to certain areas – the wider Canterbury area, the central city, the eastern suburbs and the Port Hills. Zooming out of the map shows that data has been collected as far west as Springfield and as far north as Hawarden.

Christchurch Liquefaction Damage

Another interesting overlay is the ‘liquefaction’ display. This shows the severity of liquefaction across the city, as well as any rockfall areas. It’s interesting to see that, while New Brighton and South New Brighton experienced a lot of flooding, this is classified separately to actual liqufaction.

You can see the extensive liquefaction damage in Bexley and Avondale.

In fact, I spoke with Professor Russell Green, a professor of geotechnical engineering at Virginia Tech in the US recently. He led the US National Science Foundation sponsored teams to help assess the damage in Christchurch following both the Darfied and Christchurch earthquakes.

He was interested in using some of my Christchurch earthquake photos in his technical papers and presentations and after viewing the photos he said, and I quote:

I’ve performed post-earthquake damage assessments on several earthquakes (US, Iceland, Haiti, Japan, and New Zealand), and this is by far the most severe liquefaction that I’ve seen.

Back to the map and it’s worth noting that some roads display on this map but haven’t been included in any form of liquefaction damage, despite having serious liquefaction.

See that area in Aranui that has no classification at all? Yeah, here’s a photo I took right in the middle of that area!

I think it’s fair to see that while the information displayed is extensive, it’s not quite 100% complete. Still, all in all it’s quite an impressive collection of data that’s displayed very well in this graphical interface.

With the URL being ‘eqc.eaglegis.co.nz/publicviewer’, it’s easy to imagine that there’s a ‘private viewer’ that shows more private statistics relevant to EQC and their inspections across the city – you can imagine that it would be a very useful tool for them to catch up with how things are progressing and plan their next moves.

Yeah it’s really strange that the whole area between Avondale and Dallington basically has no classification when it comes to that liquefaction map. Especially as that’s the area that was affected from the start, back in September.

About

NZ Raw: A New Zealand Blog

NZ Raw is a New Zealand blog created by Christchurch resident, Mark Lincoln. Mark writes about anything interesting he comes across in life and on the web.